


The Legend of the Boneskinner

by KestrelGirl



Category: Guild Wars 2 (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Cannibalism, Canon Rewrite, Eye Trauma, Gen, Gore, Illustrations, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Murder, Short, Suicide, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:28:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22207885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KestrelGirl/pseuds/KestrelGirl
Summary: “It doesn’t just consume you. It takes your voice, your last words, your dying screams… and it uses them to hunt.”Boneskinner rewrite... TWO. Now with illustrations. Enjoy the ride.
Kudos: 5





	The Legend of the Boneskinner

A murderous creature lurks in the forests of the north.

It was a woman, once.

It called itself Vigdis.

* * *

The woman boasts to her companions about the ferocious bear she has seen, and proclaims it her next quarry.

She sets out into the hills, brushed with snow. She finds the bear going about its day, and pounces.

Hell hath no fury like a massive predator under attack. She pierces its tough hide, but in her hubris, she ignores its massive paw, headed straight for her face.

It is the last thing she sees before her world is drowned in blood and darkness.

* * *

The woman awakens days later. She has become eternally shrouded in the blackest of nights. To her, the fact that she is alive and blind is a fate worse than death. For she is a norn, and she must hunt and roam free.

She refuses to let herself live out her days in such pitiful shape, no longer able to appreciate anything around her. So she wanders north, in search of meaning, guided only by friends and traces of long-forgotten magic.

The peaceful kodan offer their help, to give her a more comfortable life free from the pressures of the norn world. But this is not what she wants.

Raven and Wolf offer solace. But these will not do.

She seeks only her patroness, Snow Leopard.

* * *

The woman’s guide tells her that they must go no further. They have reached Jora’s Keep, the last bastion of civilization in the Far Shiverpeaks. But she feels a call, a terrible call. Her spirit is close - or so she thinks.

She ventures out on her own, into a forest of wraiths and terrors, and toward her doom. The bitter chill has nipped at the deep red gouges across her face.

Voices whisper all around her. They tell her to give in, to rest. Then her mother’s voice calls out in the cacophony, and suddenly she knows what she must do to see again. To see _her_ again.

In the solitude of an abandoned cabin, with the finesse and precision of a norn who had never been blinded at all, she drives a knife into her heart, and her life bleeds away.

* * *

Vigdis dies here, frozen and alone. Yet she remains alive in a sense, as a beast is born inside her body. For the whispers were Jormag’s voice all along, and it now seeks to make her into something that, to it, is beautiful.

The woman’s lifeless body stands up. Its neck snaps as it tilts its head back at an unnatural angle, looking skyward. Its blank eyes pool with green, narrowing into a feline roundness, and suddenly it can see again. Its last words promise its voice to Snow Leopard, and it binds its scarred mouth as a harsh reminder. It believes it can still think. It thinks it can still believe.

Yet it feels only a blood hunger. It feasts on every corpse it claims, and with every kill the cold creeps further. 

The frost claims its hands first, withering them to mangled messes of digits. As gaunt as they are, something within them seems ready to tear them apart.

Then the chill takes its legs, gashing the decaying flesh open to reveal crimson sinew and a mockery of an animal’s paws. Its feet would leave clawed tracks in the earth, were the ground of this place not frozen solid.

Its coat hides the worst of its transformation, as its body rots to a sickly pink and grows a crest of bone-white hair. Soaked blood-red, the ragged garment might be the only thing holding the creature together.

At last, the rime crawls beneath the mask. The _thing’s_ head rears too far back again, as its jaws burst from the scars, shredding the scrap of cloth that bound them. Inhuman fangs and tusks push their way out much too quickly. The skin above barely hangs on, torn at the edges of a skeletal muzzle.

* * *

Soon it will all be over. 

Whatever was left of the woman’s face will be rent away by the ice dragon’s curse, leaving an animal echo as massive antlers force their way from the newborn boneskinner’s rot-emptied skull. Its head will bow, weighed down by its new burden, forever bucking restlessly away from the ground it treads on.

Its spine will arch and wrest itself free. Gone will be the coat that hid the truth. Its entrails will still lie within the fragile cage of flesh and bone, but they will never be full, and the beast will never be sated.

Its four limbs, front and back now barely distinct, will bend in sickening cracks, shards of bone forcing their way out. It will be all too easy to forget that its monstrous, digitigrade, five-clawed paws were once the deft hands and swift feet of a hunter.

Gone will be its vow, as it lets out the screams of a thousand victims in a single, piercing shriek.

And everything will turn a glowing, deathly green.


End file.
